1My name is Laramie Stone, I am seventeen, and I am not ready for this.
Even with my heart pounding in my ears, I can't block out the terrible collision of sounds around me. Behind me, the crashes and cries of battle, blades singing through the air, the shouts of the boy I love clear above the din. Before me, the screams of my sisters from the next room, piercing my consciousness in stinging slices. I can't turn back now. All that stands between me and that door is one man and the hard promise his fist has just made against my cheek that this won't be easy.
Crushing my knees into the crumbling floorboards, I push hard against the air in front of me with both hands. It's enough to lift him backwards off of his feet, but I'm just not strong enough to hold him. He regains his footing quickly and scrambles toward me, hissing through broken teeth, face contorted with savage intent, closing in fast.
One more chance.
I drop my hands and train my eyes on his wild black ones, focusing desperately on drawing my mind in on itself. I twist my perception into a vision of myself lunging to the left and release it directly into his mind. This is my last hope, and his hungry gaze follows the illusion as I stand, defenseless now, waiting for his gnarled, bloody fingers to close around my throat.
For one tiny, infinitesimal moment, it seems like time slows down. For a moment, as the muscles coil beneath my skin, my mind slides back into the far reaches of memory, backwards through mirrors and empty rooms and twisted wreckage and salty air. Back through all the things we had to find to get here, and all that we lost along the way.
Back to where it all began.
It began on the twenty-fifth of July. I remember bare feet and Vienna's harmonica and blonde hair on my skirt, breezing down the Virginia coast with Keegan behind the wheel and my hand out the window, drawing my fingers through the rushing night air. That's the clearest beginning for us, but it goes much deeper than that.
It started earlier that night. It was on a hill about a mile from Sumner's dorm, he with grass sticking to the birthday cake smeared across his cheek and his eyes dancing as he pulled me down into the dew with the rest of them, laughing loud into the wide open summer sky…
No, it goes even farther back. I think it can be traced back to that afternoon in the used book store downtown, the man behind the counter lighting up another cigarette with heavy hands that curled around his mouth, Rosie hugging a vintage Yeats to her chest when she suddenly came up with the idea for that fateful road trip…
But that's not right either, not truly. So much more happened before all of that, things that molded us into who we all were, individually and together, at 2:37 AM on July twenty-fifth—the great climax of our youth, the last moment of life as we once knew it and the beginning of the whirlwind that took us to where we are today.
Ten years ago, home was a modest loft adrift in the Chicago fog, with a mother struggling to make a living off of her paintings and a father who worked extra jobs so that I could afford to be a ballerina. My mom had begun to outgrow that life, and when Dad lost his steady graphic design job, she packed me up and left the big city to settle back into her hometown. We bought a house we couldn't afford in one of those upper-middle-class neighborhoods, and I cried without the smell of Dad's aftershave in the morning and the paint mom used to use every night back before she had to sell her art supplies to pay for new business suits for job interviews and divorce court. I was seven.
That was when I first met the kids next door, and those two are at the heart of this whole mess.
The Holland kids were two matching sets of honey-blonde hair and vivid blue-green eyes peeking up over the top of our backyard fence three days after we moved in. Sumner was the first one to climb over, all skinned-up elbows and impish grin, followed by Rosie, her dress all bundled up in tiny hands. My clearest memories from those first few months in Chesapeake are not of my house but of Rosie's, of her high, soothing voice and of hiding among the lace curtains in the living room and of Mrs. Grace swayng around the house with her arms always full of laundry or food or fresh-cut flowers. Even then Sumner was the charmer, the golden boy. He almost always managed to effortlessly sweet talk our way out of all the trouble he invariably got us into. That summer he became that first great crush of mine, the one that you lay aside but never really get over, even though he was already charming his way into the heart of every pretty girl in the third grade and thought it was funny to call me Little Sister. I learned early on that it was dangerous for a girl like me to feel the way I did about a boy like him.
Vienna came into the picture soon afterwards. Her parents were old friends of Rosie's parents, meaning that Rosie and Vienna had practically grown up together. She lived a few streets down from us, so Rosie and Sumner dragged me along with them to visit her one afternoon. That first time I met Vienna is a blur—mostly I remember the dark-stained wood floors of her tiny, cozy house and how sly and expressive her eyes were behind black plastic-rimmed glasses. The little freckly boy who lived across the street from her was over there to play more often then not. His name was Zody, and I could tell from his easy smile and the grass stains on his clothes that he was Sumner's partner in crime.
That was the most important summer of my life—up until now, that is. That was the summer that my dad lost custody of me to my mom. He didn't fight for me as hard as I thought he would. I know he loves me more that anything, but I think in the end, part of him felt that Mom was right, that I did deserve a better life than what he could provide. That was the summer that the five of us—Rosie, Sumner, Vienna, Zody, and I—became our own family. That was the summer that Zody got that scar on his chin from a fight with some neighborhood bully that had made his sister cry, the summer that Vienna's mom had her miscarriage. That was the summer that Sumner discovered the Northampton County Little League, Rosie discovered her talent for theatre, and I discovered The Noverre Dance Academy. We started school up together in September, Sumner a year ahead of he rest of us, but that summer was what launched the dizzying course of our lives.
Two years later, while my barely-thirty mom was busy performing Olympic triathlon of raising me, going to night school, and working days as a paralegal, she met Stuart Norman, a successful business lawyer whose identity I believe can be summed up in the word "balding." He was nice enough though, and he obviously adored my mom, so I kept my disapproval to myself when he started taking her out to dinner. I even held my tongue when he asked her to marry him when I was ten, and I crossed my arms and sat silently next to father at the wedding. I know my dad would rather have thrown himself in front of a bus than watch the love of his life promise herself to some nondescript Harvard-graduate, but he came because he didn't want me to suffer alone. Stuart moved in with us, since we couldn't pay off our mortgage, and he tried his damnedest to fit into my life. Mostly I just let him play house however he wanted, but my one great act of rebellion was politely refusing to take his last name. I would let my mother do what she wanted, but I would not allow my father to be erased from my identity.
It was a year after that when a tiny girl by the name of Elle came bursting into our lives in hi-top sneakers and a flurry of color. She was from the deep south, New Orleans to be exact, and she had the accent and the welcoming, infectious personality to prove it. She's the kind of person who makes herself at home everywhere she goes, which meant that she fit right into our little circle. The same happened again when I was thirteen and Keegan arrived fresh from the hills of Ireland with her twin brother Finny in tow. Keegan's roll-up-your-sleeves mentality, hard wit, and warmth seemed to round our group out perfectly, while Finny's bookish sensibility provided a much needed voice of reason for Sumner and Zody.
And so there were eight of us, young and unafraid, held fast by bonds of friendship that felt more like family, hurtling blindly toward a fate for which we couldn't possibly begin to prepare. We were so clean then.
We've grown older now, and maybe a little bit wiser, the eight of us: Sumner the Charmer, Rosie the Peacekeeper, Vienna the Discerner, Zody the Protector, Elle the Enlivener, Keegan the Leader, Finny the Thinker, and me. I'm the Believer. That is who we have become—what life has made us into up until now. All of that is just what we picked up from the path that we've been on for all these years, but that path has ended. We have headed off on our own into untamed wilderness, and God only knows who we'll be on the other side.